Two Brooklyn Breakfast Spots Dive Deep into the New York Immigrant Experience with New Dinner Concepts

Some say you can never go home again. The weight of this statement may resonate more for the immigrants who chose to leave, refugees who were forced to and those whose communities have been ravaged by tempests or wars. Brooklyn restaurateurs Renato Poliafito and Demetri Makoulis are both first-generation Americans who have inherited a sense of their families’ birthplaces through their mothers’ cooking and languages spoken around the table in their separate Brooklyn kitchens. And since the first week of October, they, along with Makoulis’ wife, Sarah Schneider, have poured the past into their present with two restaurants dedicated to the very act of going home again.

Pasta Night and Gus & Marty’s are two of Brooklyn’s newest dinner spots; they opened, respectively, on October 1st and 4th. In Prospect Heights, Pasta Night is an Italian-American eatery or, as Poliafito calls it, “Italian with an American accent.” Gus & Marty’s, from Egg Shop’s husband-and-wife team, Makoulis and Schneider, is Greek—eye-rollingly delicious, authentic Greek with a dash of designer Williamsburg. And to the bones of its creamy stuccoed interior, it is a love letter to the islands from which Makoulis’ family emigrated.

When I spoke to the owners of Pasta Night and Gus & Marty’s, they knew little to nothing of the other, despite their similarities. Before debuting their newest projects, both restaurateurs were experts in breakfast fare. Makoulis and Schneider debuted their eggs-only dining concept, Egg Shop, in SoHo and Williamsburg in 2014 and 2017, while Poliafito opened his café, Ciao Gloria, in 2019. They both pivoted to dinner-only concepts, moved by individual journeys that brought them closer to their origin stories. And after pushing launch dates from week to week, the restaurants finally emerged, simultaneously, in two Brooklyn neighborhoods in early October.

For Makoulis and Schneider, creating Gus and Marty’s, which they named after their fathers, was about offering a new chapter for the Greek-American experience in New York. They wanted to pay homage to tradition, family and community with incredible food and a redefined atmosphere.

“Growing up, we’d go to Astoria and we had our mainstays—the Greek diners I’d go to with my dad…you’d see the same thing: white and blue, a little bit of kitsch,” Makoulis told Observer. “I love the food and grew up on it at home. I always sort of associated Greek restaurants with that general motif. I never thought outside the box. It took someone like Sarah—my family loves her to death—to get into Greek hospitality.

After meeting Makoulis in the Lower East Side in 2006, Schneider, who was raised in San Diego (she describes her father as “a Jewish Brooklyn boy”), became fully immersed in traditional Greek culture. The couple traveled to Greece often, and little by little, Sarah’s eyes opened to the layered beauty of these islands.

“I loved the cuisine and wondered, ‘Why is there not a different representation of what Greek is in New York?’ It’s such a vast place with so many different moments, why is that not what I’m seeing?” Schneider told Observer. 

The idea to open a Greek restaurant was sparked during a trip to Crete in May 2022, and by 2023, became a concrete plan. Makoulis and Schneider bought a vacant, undecorated space at 232 N. 12th Street in Williamsburg, and with the right lighting, décor, chefs Pete Lipson and Kenny Cuomo and input from Makoulis’ mother, the place began to feel like their version of a Greek home.

“Chef [Cuomo] has a fine dining background. We told him we wanted the food to be amazing, but feel like it’s your Greek grandma’s. My mom tasted the spinach pie and said, ‘It’s fantastic,’ and then had a thousand notes,” Makoulis said with a laugh. “She came back with trays of her own pies and said, ‘Taste this and replicate it.’ It really did change the recipe. Then, Chef was like, ‘I got it!’—that ineffable homemade feel!”

With a flaky crust and dense, slightly spiced filling, the spinach pie and the pillowy grilled pita delivered on that superiority that only grandmas (and really good fine dining chefs pretending to be grandmas) can deliver.

Meanwhile, over at Pasta Night, Poliafito, his business partner and co-owner  Joseph Catalanotti and head chef Carly Voltero are going, in Poliafito’s words, “mother sauce-forward, not pasta shape-forward.” Rich explorations of Italian classics with the reigns held tight to simplicity guide the seasonally rotating menu of house-made pastas and crisp chicken Milanese. 

Pasta Night sits in the space directly across from Poliafito’s Ciao Gloria, which is dedicated to exceptional coffees, baked goods and lunch. The café was the first venture that helped the designer-turned-baker and restaurateur honor his Sicilian roots, but Poliafito didn’t always dream of doing so.

Poliafito’s parents immigrated from Sicily to Brooklyn in the 1950s. After the Pasta Night owner was born in 1979, he spent four to nine months at a time throughout his childhood with his parents back in Italy. As a young New Yorker in the ‘80s, Poliafito began to dread these long stints away from home and felt removed from his heritage. All this changed, however, during a semester abroad in Florence to study art.

“It shifted things for me, 100 percent. I really got to witness and experience it in a very different way. For me, that was amazing. It started my fascination with Italy. From then on out, I went often in my adulthood. I focused on all the different regions; learned about the country itself, Poliafito told Observer. “That’s what brought me to Ciao Gloria.”

From its October 2019 opening until the pandemic in 2020, Ciao Gloria hosted occasional pasta nights: pop-ups that offered hand-made pasta to diners in a supper club format. When the building across the street became vacant, Poliafito knew it was his opportunity to make pasta night permanent, and subsequently purchased the space in May 2024.

“It’s a further celebration of my Italian heritage with those American touches,” Poliafito said. “Ciao Gloria is American with an Italian accent. Pasta Night is Italian with an American accent.”

Everything from the menu to the décor pays homage to Poliafito’s roots. The changing menu currently offers a Carbonara di Stagione (of the season), lasagna, arancini (a Sicilian street food of fried rice balls with fillings of meat and cheese or peas), a Genovese pesto with broccoli rabe that uses traditionally Puglian orecchiette, and Poliaftio’s personal favorite: The Big Ragu (a Laverne and Shirley reference), which tosses Malfade in a slow-braised ragu and luscious Parmigiano-Reggiano-based cream sauce.

Pasta Night’s interior is a reflection of Poliafito’s past, drawing inspiration from 1980s Italy, when the restaurateur first experienced the country. The terracotta-tiled bar is illuminated by retro geometric sconces. The lovingly scratched wood floors, brick walls and green leather booths in the dining area could exist in any well-designed New York restaurant, but framed vintage artwork and a delightfully gaudy, mirrored console table bring guests right back to Poliafito’s vision. The shiny, bubblegum pink diamond tiles in the bathroom pop with a framed poster of a 1986 Italian erotic film called I Racconti Sensuali di Cicciolina.

“The images from 1980s Italy are burned in my brain. I couldn’t explain to anyone else outside of my family what I saw or experienced,” Poliafito said. “Now I can actually express it.”

The design complements Ciao Gloria’s 1950s-60s coastal Sicilian atmosphere. And while both restaurants are ways Poliafito has learned to express his own experience as a first-generation American, he is grateful to have shared this with the generations who brought him here.

“My mom passed away last month. I am trying to focus on positive aspects. She was 90, she had a great life, loved her kids. She passed as peacefully as possible,” Poliafito shared. “It all happened simultaneously with the restaurant. I think my mom would’ve loved it. She heard all about it. In my mind, [Pasta Night] is my dedication to her.”

To decorate one large wall at Gus & Marty’s, Makoulis and Schneider went through dozens of family photos, searching for the best images to display that would allow customers to travel back through time with them.

“My mom was a prolific documentarian of our lives and their lives. Sarah and I went through all the photo albums and pulled what we gravitated towards and loved. Taking them, scanning them and blowing up in high-res—I bought every one of these frames from eBay and Etsy— putting them in there, I gotta tell you,” Makoulis said, taking a moment as he choked up and paused to reflect, “the rest of my family is all in Greece. I was able to walk in their shoes in a way that I hadn’t before.”

When Makoulis’ father came to the restaurant after the gallery wall went up, he stopped and gazed at each photo, whispering to himself about the faces walking through his memories and experiences.

“And that’s Eleni,” he uttered to his son, “And what if she knew that 40, 50 years later, she’d be here.”

When I asked who Eleni was, Makoulis shared that she was the quality control person at the factory his father managed. He initially selected the photo for the aesthetic, but perhaps one day, if Eleni is still alive and well in Brooklyn, she too will find herself coming home again through the doors of Gus & Marty’s.

Though Poliafito and the Makoulis-Schneiders are strangers, they share a thread and weave together what defines the immigrant experience in New York, for this generation and those who came before it. They are inviting and unassuming—striving to deliver a new experience based on the ones that defined their own. They serve as beacons of light for neighbors and visitors of every background. They call to the fine passengers of this crowded metropolis to stop into the motherlands of their mothers and fathers—to stay awhile at wood tables stacked with homemade pita and pasta, to drink from the vines of the Mediterranean and discover what it means to be together.